The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

Mike Cameron received a 25-day suspension for testing positive again under the stimulant policy. ESPN story. It’s the “tainted supplement” track, except with an interesting twist:

He later issued a statement through his agent, saying doctors for the players’ association helped him narrow down what triggered the positive test.

“After all of the analysis and testing, I can only conclude that a nutritional supplement I was taking was tainted,” he said. “Unfortunately, the actual supplement is gone, and therefore cannot be tested. Without the actual supplement in hand, the rules are clear, and I must accept the suspension.”

As skeptical as I am generally of the “supplement” use, I’ve also argued that the current rules are really hard on players, particularly players who don’t speak English as their first language. There’s no list of approved supplements (or there wasn’t last time I looked into this), no certification process, or anything. And you can’t expect players to run everything they take through a test themselves to determine if there are trace amounts of a different drug. I wanted to see MLB and the Players’ Association work together to start making inroads into the problem, and this may be a sign that the union, at least, is taking an active interest in looking into what supplements might cause problems for their players.

Anything that helps players avoid positive tests as a result of unintentional ingestion is good. If nothing else, it would help remove this excuse.

Over at the New York Times, a story today reports teams received advance notice of drug testing:

Drug testers contracted by the league routinely alert team officials a day or more before their arrival at ballparks for what is supposed to be random, unannounced testing of players. By eliminating the surprise factor, the practice undermines the integrity of the testing program, antidoping experts said.

Does it ever. Teams could alert their guys a day early? Wow. You wouldn’t be able to pass a test for steroids, most likely, but the extremely short-lived stimulants? Absolutely. Get the word out, and you greatly help the chances that those players get busted. Even if you think they’re detectable for a couple days, knowing to give the “don’t dose tonight if you were ever dosing, wink wink” signal helps. Huge deal.

This is one of the biggest holes in the minor league program. There were constant rumors that teams had tons of time to prepare for random tests, and that they knew who would be tested. As a result, many people viewed the whole program as something of a joke. I believe the rumors have bubbled up in public, but I don’t have a cite handy.

The possibility I thought of immediately – and this isn’t mentioned at all – is that the team could take a much more active role in having a player dodge the test. Say you’ve got a known steroid user on the team, and you find out the testers are on their way, and without knowing the cycles, you know they’re in trouble if they get tested the next day. You could easily DL them and send them off to see a specialist about that nagging hamstring injury (should inflammation for pitchers) to buy some time. They’re not going to get a

You’d have to be really clever about the “how” and hope the league doesn’t find out, or that player doesn’t test positive when they catch up to them, but I’m sure you can think about how that game could be played.

Without knowing test dates, we can’t go through the transaction logs for weird player moves or anything, so we can’t know if anything like this happened. It’s interesting, though, and I hope baseball’s able to figure out how to do surprise testing in a way that’s a guaranteed surprise.

Also, Howard Bryant, author of the fine Juicing the Game, replied in comments to my disagreement with his ESPN article.

Astute reader Lance Elroy wrote to point me to a bit of footage where, in the sixth inning, you can – maybe – see Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek putting pine tar on his fingers. It’s during Manny’s at-bat, the 2nd 3-2 pitch: (“good rip by Manny Ramirez…”) there’s a shot of Varitek in the dugout, and it looks like watching the dugout camera to make sure it’s not on, rubbing his hands…? He certainly looks fishy, but I’m not convinced he was up to anything nefarious: he might be getting ready to be put in with Wakefield out (which he was) — you can see during Drew’s at-bat Varitek’s putting his batting gear on, and he’s on-deck with Crisp up. It seems unlikely that Varitek was tarring his hands that early in the inning, and any advantage is deadened by his at-bat preparations.

It wouldn’t be a new trick, though. Catchers assisting their pitchers in ball-doctoring is a long and time-honored tradition. The pitcher’s under a lot of scrutiny, while their catchers are far freer to scuff or put something on a ball for the pitcher to make use of.

But was he trying to get pine tar onto the ball for Lester’s sake? Even if he was intending to go out on the field with tarred hands, there’s another, more prosaic explanation: Varitek’s not particularly good at throwing out runners (this year, he threw out 24% of opposing runners, putting him in the lower half of AL catchers). Pine tar on the fingers would give him a better grip on the ball making the difficult transfer to through, and help him get the throw off faster.

You’re not supposed to do it. But if you can get away with it and gain an advantage, why not?

The Philadelphia Daily News:

TBS cameras on Corpas warming up before coming into yesterday’s 4-2 Colorado win in Game 1 of the National League Division Series at Citizens Bank Park clearly showed the righthander pour a cup of water or soda on the front of his shirt before leaving the bullpen and then rubbing dirt on the area.

Then, when he went into the game, he appeared to go to that spot before several of his pitches in order to get a better grip on the baseball. Since the Rockies’ road jerseys are black, any discoloration on the shirt would have been difficult to detect.

The article notes that it’s illegal for pitchers to apply anything to the baseball. The problem here, as we’ve seen with K-Rod and Joe Nathan and many other pitchers, is that the rule’s entirely unenforced. You can go out there with pine tar smeared all over your cap and rub your fingers in it before a pitch and not get called.

Here’s a totally awesome video of what went on, at least until MLB takes it down:

Will baseball, having failed to do anything about similar incidents all year – including cases where there was clear video evidence – take any action here? As much as the playoffs are higher profile, it still seems unlikely.

Reader Bob Montgomery wrote:

Relatedly, I’m sure you saw this story:

Tobin said the explosion in home runs coincides with a mid-1990s “steroid era” in professional sports. Use dropped to historic levels in 2003 when Major League Baseball instituted steroid testing, the article offers as background.

“A change of only a few percent in the average speed of the batted ball, which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, is enough to increase home run production by at least 50 percent,” Tobin said in a news release.

I haven’t checked the numbers out, but…
This, though:

Tobin applied a similar, though less extensive, mechanical analysis to pitching and found a smaller impact. He calculated that a 10 percent increase in muscle mass should increase the speed of a thrown ball by about 5 percent, or 4 to 5 miles per hour for a pitcher with a 90-mile-per-hour fastball. That translates to a reduction in earned run average of about 0.5 runs per game.

“That is enough to have a meaningful effect on the success of a pitcher, but it is not nearly as dramatic as the effects on home run production,” Tobin said.

5 mph seems huge to me!

Yeah. It’d be huge. Think about it like this: a pitcher with an 87-mph fastball and good control is at best a marginal major leaguer, most likely grinding out a job at the back of the rotation or in long relief. Throwing 92 with good control, though — that’s a front-end rotation guy.

Similarly, the effects for hitters would be equally huge.

The problem is that anecdotally, we just haven’t seen those kind of increases. The marginal players who’ve been caught in baseball’s testing program saw modest increases – Nate Silver looked into this for “Baseball Between the Numbers” and it was there but not huge. We can look to other suspected or all-but-known players, like Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, and make some assumptions, but they’re still not that huge.

And for pitchers, there isn’t a lot of evidence to point to any consistent velocity increase. Some pitchers seem to have gained 2-3mph on their fastball, but the benefits are largely in recovery and anti-inflammation, not in raw power.

Under Tobin’s theory, what you could look for in the minors as a determinant of steroid use by pitchers would be descriptions of a pitcher’s velocity through their development. Velocity estimates are unreliable generally, but you would see players stall out in their careers, suddenly return from the off-season throwing +5mph and make the majors. That development path just hasn’t been there, and if pitchers could consistently make that kind of leap, a huge, huge number would all make it as soon as the choice between use & advance and stall was presented to them — and that would be AA & AAA. It’s not there.

Again, anecdotally what we’ve seen is some pitchers who are stalled in the minors see a much more modest increase in velocity.

Beyond that, I think the attribution of the rise in home runs neglects a lot of the other, larger things going on that also drove the home run rate in those years.